With Liberty and Amnesty for All

It’s particularly melancholy as Memorial Day approaches and we remember those who gave their all to preserve our country, that our current President and a significant fraction of the supposedly conservative party in the Senate have decided to ignore, nay encourage, a massive invasion of America by a foreign country.

In fact, these folks (along with almost all of the Democrats, which is no surprise because you expect this lot to be crazy and craven) have presented us with a hairball of an immigration law, which, if we are crazy enough to enact, would give us a complicated immigration non-system designed to draw attention away from the fact that it would effectively erase the southern border of The United States.

The invasion of course is from Mexico, untold millions of which country’s citizens have simply crossed the border and set up lives here. If we adopt the current immigration bill, as the no-borders crowd wants (it could be called the Invasion Legalization Act of 2007), millions more will come to El Norte after it becomes clear the import of the new law is that Mexican citizens here illegally will never be obliged to go home. Never. Nunca.

OK, show of hands here please of those who believe the Bush, Boehner, McConnell gang will ever oblige any Mexican citizen, under any circumstance, to return home. The current proposed bill doesn’t provide for the bureaucratic infrastructure to accomplish this. We can’t keep track of people here on tourist and student visas now. How on earth are we supposed to run a system that would fine, tax, and do background checks on millions of Mexicans (and others) here illegally while at the same time keeping track of where they are? To the nearest hundred thousand, how many more federal bureaucrats would this require if we were even serious about doing it?

On this one, W once again finds himself aligned with elites rather than with a clear majority of Americans who want the invasion stopped and then reversed. His constituencies on this scam are: big business (motto: mucho trabajo — poco dinero), Democrats and other liberals/leftists, Hispanics (especially of the registered voter kind), reconquistadores, academe, and the Mexican government.

W is not only dead wrong on the issue, he has of late been adding insult to injury by suggesting that those who oppose his we-don-need-no-stinking-borders policy are a bunch a racist yahoos and xenophobes. This attitude on the part of W and other no-borders advocates can only be accounted for by arrogance and political tone-deafness of operatic dimensions.

So in the name of cheap labor for W’s corporate cronies, and in the name of a paralyzing multiculturalism so stringent it won’t even allow for distinguishing between who is an American and who isn’t, we’ll run the risk of dealing with a huge cultural and linguistic pig-in-the-python that would damage our culture and cost us a packet. And we’re to like this or else we’re a bunch of nativist swine.

The “debate” on this issue has been a virtual bad-ideas Olympics, causing countless migraines across the lower 48 among those who respect the language (English or Spanish.) No point in wasting time or breath on the is-it-or-isn’t-it-amnesty question. No one’s going home, so what else do you need to know? But perhaps the award for most disingenuous goes to those who say we can’t enforce our present immigration laws. How on earth would they know? We’ve never tried.

We have sufficient immigration law, law just waiting to be enforced. The political class and the media have grossly exaggerated the difficulty of dealing with this problem. And they’ve grossly exaggerated the benefit to the economy of the illegals here while minimizing the cost to having them here. (Is it really racist to suggest that American cities probably would not benefit from additional Latino gang members?)

Of course we can’t stop every Mexican from sneaking into the country. But we could slow the flow to a trickle by building a wall, by expanding the Border Patrol and allowing the agents to do their jobs with a little technological help. And by attrition we can start sending the illegals here back home. We don’t have to send them all home overnight (this is the straw man of straw men — no one has said we need to get them out of the country overnight), but we do have to send the message that if you’re here illegally you can’t stay.

Borders are an absolute requirement of sovereignty. They’re not hate crimes. If America can’t police its own borders and eject anyone from the country who shouldn’t be here, how on earth can we defend ourselves against world-wide Islamo-fascists who want to kill us all, or, God help us, from the Red Chinese when they feel like they’re ready to strap us on?

On a human level it’s easy to feel sympathy for Mexican citizens, many of whom are right nice folks, forced live in a poor and corrupt country. But the world is flush with poor and corrupt countries. And we can’t accommodate the billions who would rather be here than where they are. (What if we discovered life on Mars? Would the Left argue that Martians are entitled to the protection of our Army and Navy and that I must pay for their children’s education? I can hear it now: “Vee R not criminals, Earth People.”)

The government of the United States needs to decide who enter can enter the country and who can stay, not employers who eager for cheap labor or arrogant and presumptuous demonstrators from other countries who seem to think the U.S. Constitution confers rights on them and that American citizens have obligations toward them. And anyone who thinks this is racist can just get together with Harry Reid and have a good cry.